The interconnectedness of things
"Whatever brings the worst out of you: Find it, cull it, flourish ~ KDA 2024"
Everything is connected to everything else
As I write this piece, the anti-tax (a gross oversimplification, but oh well) protests in Kenya have just ended. I have never in my entire life felt such an intense torrent of emotion pass through me as I did during this period. I argued, lambasted and acted with an intensity that was frankly, foreign to any previous conception of self I had . The heatedness of the ordeal brought out aspects of myself, and of many of others around me, that I had never seen before. I was learning myself and others anew.
I came to recognize (and be appalled at) what happens to my stream of consciousness in high-pressure intellectual situations. I surprised myself by just how low I was willing to go to enhance the legitimacy of any point I was trying to make. To orient situations so that I gain an experiential link between myself and what is going on, and gain an intellectual high ground. I have come to realize that I need to think very deeply about what I bring out of people/things/places around me, and what they bring out of me in turn.
Through this frame of thinking, I have come to appreciate something. That my general annoyance with the perceived negatives of people around me, has often blinded me to how they bring more out of me than I would out of myself. Some bring me vision; some inspire in me a will to the seemingly impossible; some put me in uncomfortable situations where I have had to pick up skills that are fundamental to how I define myself today.
For example, I first seriously did any sustained writing when my friend gave me an invite to send written pieces to his blog manenoz. Before that, I'd only been writing random things in old exercise books since high school. After that, I got the chance to set up and run a blog for my school, which I did for a year, before somehow ending up here, untangling my web of a mind in public, on substack, and people subscribing to read it. The more you think about it, the more you realize how everything is connected to everything else.
I can't help but wonder, did traditional African societies understand this? - is that why communitarianism is so foundational? Here (in Africa), as recently ad some decades back, a child did not belong to their parents; they belonged to the community, and when they grew up, they did not exist for themselves they existed for the community. Your father's brothers were your fathers. That random madman in the market was as important as the rich village winemaker. (They split the wood at funerals and weddings, flogged thieves, watched the markets at night e.t.c)
Action is a much greater indicator of our state of being than how we feel
This dimension of thinking provides a very good mechanism for examining oneself wholesomely; in connection with the entirety of our environments yet in isolation from them enough that things make sense. It allows you to reflect on everything around you with great integrity. You see the aspects of yourself that are inefficiently connected to your goals and pursuits and hinder their achievement. This results in an incredible clarity of not just yourself, but of everything connected to you.
It also provides a good way to orient yourself in all your relationships. Imagine if you switched to a framework of what you bring out of people and what they bring out of you, in service of your struggle to align yourself with your highest self. Imagine for just a second, you stopped overanalysing your feelings, and started looking at the true impact of everything in your life, reflected in your outcomes, habits, behaviours...etc. Imagine the depth of understanding you would gain, of your relations with yourself, your items, your friends and your family. Beyond the level of mere momentary emotion, you see of the impact of people, places and things in your life.
Why ask 'what does it bring out of me?' instead of 'how does it make me feel?' Our minds are Terra incognita. Action, being externalised thought, is a much greater indicator of the states of our psyche than our ephemeral feelings, it is enduring. It is more than what is consciously perceptible to us. High levels of competence also seem, to me, to be heavily tied to this type of thinking. When you focus on outcomes and actions in the grand scheme of things instead of your isolated emotions in one moment, you are better able to persevere through slumps. Further, an interconnected, holistic perspective of one's abilities enables the transference of skills to other domains. Former world Chess champion, Josh Waitzkin used his insights in chess to become a world Tai Chi push-hands champion, a world class diver, fencer e.tc. (It's seriously fascinating stuff, look it up).
An integrated life
Whatever brings the worst out of you: Find it, cull it, flourish ~ KDA 2024
Something very fascinating happens when you focus on the good you bring out of someone, reinforce it, and simultaneously cut out the things that bring the worst out of you. Centering your life around this tenet allows you to constantly and consistently bring the best out of people, and they in turn bring the best out of you.
Imagine how amazing your life would be, if the people you respected intellectually, were the people you respected experientially, and were the people you were attracted to sexually. And why not? Who is a fissured life good for anyway? What is the point of studying the interconnectedness of things, if not to see how to align everything in such a way that it brings the most out of you and you bring the best out of everything? Isn't a perfect life one so interconnected that your wife is your best friend is your intellectual confidant is your lover is your movie buddy?
When everything else falls away, what do you want at the very core of your life? How is it manifested in what your life already looks like? Does the answer to the following questions make you smile when you think about it? "What am I deeply passionate about? What taps my talent?" What meets a significant need in the world? Everyone should strive for integrity in the traditional sense: wholeness. Being whole in every sense (with yourself) and shedding personas to allow your true self to connect with others true selves (who for some reason tend to respond well to openness and integrity! Lucky!).
Bringing it all together
You shape your environment, and it in turn shapes you . Every human relationship exists as a coevolutionary loop. Just about a year ago, I had an almost ungodly crush on a girl. She was a clean freak and she hated slobs. Somehow, I found myself driven to be cleaner, even till now when we haven't talked in months. Lesson? You need to be very very selective of who you hang around. One person can drive you to heaven, and another to the depths of hell itself... and they won't even actively do it.
Internally, you need to find the connections between things you are curious about and then find a way to embody those things in your everyday life. For example, why would you pick a research topic for a thesis, that you haven't the least bit of interest in? If you can get away with doing a dissertation about Beyonce, do it! That may well be the key to discovering yourself. This ties in to the ideas of an author I like quite a bit, M. Scott Peck. According to him, when you identify and pursue the things that excite you the most, life naturally takes a direction that continues to excite you. Toni Morrison has a beautiful quote that fits this concept:
1. Whatever the work is, do it well—not for the boss but for yourself.
2. You make the job; it doesn't make you.
3. Your real life is with us, your family.
4. You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.
Lastly, and this one is (obviously) something I'm very biased towards. Write. Writing is the most easily accessible method to connect to your own subconscious, and see what Freudian monsters drive you to keep dating those crusty boys (with dirt under their fingernails) you swear you hate so much.
extra tid-bit because I like you guys
Obviously, my ideas didn't come into being out of nothingness either. I read, dreamt, screamed, experienced, and conversated (is that a word?) my way into this rather coherent (at least I think so) stream of consciousness. I can't take you all to experience all that, but I can do something close. I can give you the gates to the worlds that opened my eyes to these realizations. Enjoy.
reading list:
1.The Art of Impossible: A Peak Performance Primer" by Steven Kotler
2.The Surrender Experiment: My Journey into Life's Perfection" by Michael A. Singer
3.The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance" by Josh Waitzkin
4.The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself" by Michael A. Singer
5.Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less" by Greg McKeown